Sending Email
To send email using the Amazon SES provider, you will need an AWS account. If you don’t have an account yet, visit the AWS website and click on the “Create an AWS Account” button in the top right corner of the screen.
You should know that even if you only plan to use the free tier, you will need to provide your credit card details.
After creating an account, enter ‘Simple Email Service‘ in the ‘Find Services’ search bar in the AWS Management Console, then select the corresponding option from the drop-down menu to access the SES (Simple Email Service) dashboard.
Click on the ‘Go to Identity Management’ button.
You will need to verify the domain name you want to send your emails to. Therefore, click on Verify a New Domain.
“We will not configure DKIM settings at this stage, but it is recommended to do so when moving to a production environment. DKIM settings will reduce the risk of your messages being marked as spam.
When you click the Verify this Domain button, you will be provided with a domain name verification record.
You now need to go to the site where you manage DNS for the given domain name (usually your domain registrar). The steps for this process vary from provider to provider and are beyond the scope of this document. However, you must create a TXT record for the domain and copy the information from the ‘Name’ and ‘Value’ columns.
After completing this step, click the Close button. At first, the Verification status will appear as “awaiting verification” and the Enabled for submission option will be marked as “No”.
As long as you set the DNS record correctly, the Validation status will change to “verified” and the Enabled for submission option will appear as “Yes”. You should also receive an email notification that the domain has been successfully verified.
It may take some time for this transition to take place. However, if it fails, make sure that you have not accidentally copied and pasted spaces at the beginning or end of both text strings.
We also need to create a “configuration set”. To do this, select Configuration Sets from the side menu of the SES panel.
If email tracking (delivery, open, etc.) is not required, you only need to create one configuration set.
The next step is to create an access key pair. For this you need to go to the IAM (Identity and Access Management) module of AWS.
It is best to create a new IAM user. To do this, click Users and press the Add user button. Although you can generate an access key pair using your root user account, doing so is strongly discouraged, as it grants unrestricted access to the AWS console and poses a significant security risk if compromised.
Since this user does not require access to the management console, select ‘Programmatic access only’.
If you also want to enable email tracking, you will need to add the AmazonSNSFullAccess policy.
After creating the user, copy and paste the Access Key and Secret Access Key into the provider configuration in the Grispi Bulk Email Portal.
We are now ready to configure the provider with Grispi Bulk Mail .
Congratulations! You can now send emails using Amazon SES.
If you need more information about SES, you can check out the official Amazon SES documentation.
Follow-up
If you want to enable tracking for emails you send through SES, we need to complete a few additional steps.
You need to configure Amazon’s SNS (Simple Notification Service) so that you can send the required webhooks to the Grispi Bulk Email Portal . To do this, go to the SNS page in the AWS Management Console.
To get started, create a topic. Select Topics from the menu and press the Create topic button. At the moment, apart from a name, all other information is optional.
You must also create a subscription associated with the topic you created.
For Topic ARN, select the topic you just created and select HTTPS as the protocol. The endpoint URL will vary based on your domain name, but it should follow this format: /api/v1/webhooks/aws. For example, if the Grispi Mass E-Mail Portal is installed at : https://campaigns.marketing.com, each webhook must be redirected to: https://campaigns.marketing.com/api/v1/webhooks/aws.
Ensure that ‘Raw Message Delivery’ is disabled, as enabling it will prevent webhooks from being processed correctly.
The subscription must be approved before you start using it. However, if you have provided the correct URL for your Grispi Bulk E-Mail Portal instance and this URL is accessible from the outside world, we will automatically perform the approval process for you.
You should see the status change to Confirmed.
Now we need to tell SES to send the email tracking webhooks to this endpoint. For this, go to the SES dashboard again (we are almost done…).
In Domains, select the domain you configured earlier and open the section titled Notifications.
Click the Edit Configuration button and select the SNS topic you created from the drop-down menu for each notification type.
Finally, enable the notification types for the configuration set you created. Select the configuration set from the list and select SNS from the drop-down menu next to Add Destination.
Select all the notification types you want to receive (except ‘Send’ and ‘Rendering Failure’) and choose the relevant SNS topic from the list.
That’s it, friends! You are now configured to send and track emails using Amazon AWS. 😊🎉
Throttling
AWS enforces rate limits on email sending via the SES API. By default, requests are limited to one per second, but you can request an increase.
Therefore, implementing a caching mechanism is recommended when using AWS SES. For small mailing lists, a file-based cache may be sufficient, but for medium to large mailing lists, we recommend using Redis.
